PC Magazine - Linux Solutions

Welcome to PC Magazine Linux Solutions. This book is a bit of departure for PC Magazine, as the normal focus hereabouts is on Microsoft’s operating systems, but a growing number of PC users have become interested in Linux in recent years.
Linux was first released to the public in 1994. It was originally created by a Finnish college student named Linus Torvalds. He was looking for something he could run on his PC that would duplicate the functionality of his school’s Unix mainframe. Finding nothing that met his needs, he decided to
build it himself. Deciding that he needed help, he released it on the Internet, declaring that anybody who wanted a copy could have one, so long as they made any changes or improvements in it available to the public.

Apparently, there were quite a few people who were also looking for the same thing, because an army of developers took up the task, and within only a couple of years, Linux was a full-featured system. I first discovered Linux in 1997, when I was working at Georgia Tech. I had met several computer science and engineering students who used Linux regularly. Encouraged by what they were doing, I
installed Red Hat Linux 4.2 on an old 386 PC. It took hours, and when I was done, I had a machine with only a command-line interface. I was used to working on this type of machine, as I had worked on Unix machines in college, and with later employers. At the time, the current version of Windows was Windows 95. I had a Windows 95 machine at work, but at home, I was still using a 496 loaded with Windows 3.1. Both machines crashed often, and the Windows 3.1 machine was almost unusably slow. I remember how excited I was to have a machine that would let me get my e-mail and Usenet news quickly and without crashing.

As Linux matured and I accumulated better PC hardware, I was eventually able to run a graphical interface, and do things like surf the Web, play music and video, and manage documents. When broadband Internet access came to our town, I discovered the real power of Linux, running e-mail and Web servers, and using my old 386 as a router to share my Internet connection among severalmachines.

Around that time, I met my agent, David Fugate. He was looking for people to write about this new operating system that was beginning to get attention from a variety of quarters. The result of our meeting was a collaboration with other authors about the StarOffice suite of applications—a suite which eventually metamorphosed into the OpenOffice.org productivity suite, which can be found on just about every major linux distribution.

Today, Linux is everywhere. What was once considered a “hacker’s toy” is now a serious player in
the server market and a legitimate presence on desktops. Linux distributions are produced by small
groups of volunteers and by publicly traded corporations. After 11 years, Linux just keeps getting
better. New features are added and refinements are made constantly. Great Linux-based software
applications are being created all the time.
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